http://www.bungie.net/news/content.aspx?type=topnews&cid=18361
The months of subtle hinting and sly dodging are over, the Mythic Map Pack is coming to the Xbox LIVE Marketplace on April 9th, 2009.
For those who have stumbled into this story completely oblivious, here's the condensed version of what you can expect to get when you plunk down your hard-earned 800 Microsoft Points in exchange for this trio of maps:
"New spaces, new skulls, and new achievements for Halo 3's Multiplayer experience. Get tactical in Orbital, compete on the symmetrical Assembly, and construct your own creation with the Forger’s paradise, Sandbox, a blank slate offering players unprecedented levels of customization."
Speaking of unprecedented, on the heels of our One Billionth game played, we thought we'd dig into to some of the other Halo 3 stats we can track to put things into a little perspective, just prior to the Mythic Map Pack's public release.
Halo 3 launched back in September of 2007. On April 9th, when the Mythic Map Pack becomes available, nearly twenty full months will have transpired. We're not going to play coy, after the successes of both Halo and Halo 2, we knew Halo 3 was poised to see a ton of buzz and even more hours of gameplay, but we never knew it would still be going so strong, so many months after its launch.
We're honored that you're still playing.
Here are a few Halo 3 factoids that we're really proud of:
- Halo 3 is still averaging close to 900,000 unique players per day on Xbox LIVE, it routinely pushes over a million on weekends, and it's actually trending upwards.
- The average Halo 3 player session clocks in at roughly one hour per play.
- The Legendary Map Pack, released just about one year ago, still averages over five thousand downloads per day!
- Both the Heroic Map Pack and Cold Storage are holding strong at over 11,000 downloads per day.
- Halo 3 charted fifteenth overall in the NPD sales chart for February 2009, again, nearly twenty months out from our retail launch.
- You're closing in on Ten BILLION Covenant Campaign kills all told (just under 9.8 billion currently).
- Total Halo 3 Players Smashed by the Banhammer, for any reason, ever: 57,854.
- Players rocking the New Hayabusa (aka Recon Armor): 452.
Some stats on your user-created content:
- Total Content Items Downloaded : 1,467,453,346.
- Total Uploaded: 70,699,248.
- Screenshots currently available on B.net: 70,157,911.
- Saved Films and Film Clips currently on B.net: 5,671,549 (for a total running time of 730,445,087 seconds).
- Game Variants currently available on B.net: 409,009.
- Map Variants currently available on B.net: 1,384,343.
According to the data we receive from Xbox LIVE:
- Close to 15 million people have played Halo 3, Launch-to-Date.
- Over 2 million players have completed the campaign on Legendary Difficulty.
- Over 9 million players have Graduated from Basic Training in Matchmaking.
- Over 6.8 million players have earned the MVP Award in a Ranked Playlist.
- Just over a quarter-million people have earned their Annual Achievement so far (what are you waiting for?! The ROAD TO RECON is open for all. Get on it!).
- A total of nearly 200 MILLION Achievements have been unlocked in Halo 3.
For the full spate of B.net coverage, you can check out all the the blog posts and Top Stories organized under the Mythic Map Pack label. If you fancy yourself more of a visually oriented person, we've got dozens of Mythic Map Pack Screenshots in our official Halo 3 Gallery.
We know the Mythic Map Pack has been a long time coming. We can't wait for you to drop in and get some game time logged on our three new spaces. We'd also like to stress, as always, that we couldn't have done it without you, the player. Thanks for taking our games and making them you're own. You kick ass. We can't wait to see what you do with Sandbox. And we can't wait for you to see what else we have in store for 2009 and beyond.
Thanks for playing.
P.S. Our great friends over at HBO are getting in on the Mythic Map Pack act, asking those who've already been given an early screening to return the favor and produce their own short trailer for the maps. If you want to try your hand, follow the link below, read the instructions, and fire up your capture cards. We'll be watching.
